Musical discoveries: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Melancholy and poetic, deeply textured and strangely sorrowful with an odd, peaceful soul: Yep, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds are back with a new song, and it's everything we hoped it would be.

“We No Who We R” — the first single from the band's forthcoming album, “Push the Sky Away” — shows Cave in the same brooding, meditative form that brought us his classic songs such as “Into My Arms,” “The Ship Song” and, perhaps most famously, “The Mercy Seat.”

Here, Cave is as lyrical and dark-minded as ever, writing: “The trees will burn with blackened hands/ We have nowhere to rest. We have nowhere to land/ We know who you are/ we know where you live/ And we know there's no need to forgive/ again.”

The tone is elegiac, heightened by a wistful children's choir on the chorus, but there's something almost eerily calm about the song, making a lyrical image of what seems to be a pitchfork-wielding mob into something that transcends mere anger. There's a mystery at the heart of the song, as there often is with Cave — the listener has no idea of who is being addressed, does not know whether the subject of the song doesn't need forgiveness or whether forgiveness is now immaterial for the descending crowd.

Perhaps it doesn't matter. As with Cave's earlier masterwork, “The Mercy Seat,” the questions are skimmed over in favor of the evocative moment, when rage and judgment give way to cold certainty. Cave never spells it out, but the song has a funereal ring about it, and perhaps that's all that need be said.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds will perform March 24 at the Orpheum Theater in Boston. (Victor D. Infante)